Ars Technica is running an interesting article about the Mail application on Windows 8. It's one of the first party Metro applications, and Ars' conclusion is that it's really, really not up to snuff - it can't even compare favourably to the mail application on Windows Phone. The sad thing is, however - this applies to virtually all Metro applications.

Sure some apis in Mac OS X are deprecated. However, the Mac OS X frameworks are directly descended from NeXTStep which was first released in 1988. If you understood AppKit in 1988, you will have no trouble understanding Cocoa in 2012. There is just no contest, and not many people even know how far ahead NeXT was. The current Balmer led Microsoft is about as far from NeXT or Apple in terms of vision and implementing that vision in terms of apis as you could possibly imagine.

So much revisionism here. Apple tried to write their next version of Mac OS in multiple ways, including Pink, Blue and Taligent and failed. Eventually Apple just bought NextStep and put all the old OS API in Carbon, and deprecated that. They continue to deprecrate APIs, including their own Quicktime API. Apple screwed up many other APIs like Game Sprocket, that Microsoft got right.

It's stupid to talk about Windows vs Mac by looking at the Windows API history all the way back to the 80s, but only considering Mac OS X, and a fantasy version of NextStep as all the Mac side did.